Note: This is funniest EBay entry I have seen in years. Bidding starts at $666.

Cursed Land and/or House

Five pounds of land removed from the center of the basement of the cursed house. If the bid goes over 80k, I will throw in the deed to the place after I settle with the bloodsuckers at IRS and the loansharks, if you want it.

Superstition or Desperation

A Brief History

I am not sure if the place is on top of an old cemetery or was the site of some bizarre murder. Maybe somebody bumped uglies with some witch doctor’s wife there. I do know that it acts as an amplifier of evil. Prolonged contact with any aspect of that place will turn a social drinker into a full bore drunk, the midnight toker into a junkie, a moody person into a raving lunatic etc.

My wife, my three kids and I moved into the place in the early eighties as renters. It seemed like a nice place in a nice little town only five minutes instead of forty from where I was working. All seemed well or so the demons wanted me to think. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t going anywhere. They set the hook when Mr. Landlord said he was going to sell the place and I bought it. Of course the timing was perfect. Interest rates were at all time highs and I got stuck with an 11.5% interest house note.

The demons started out slowly with the inspiration for the movie “The Money Pit”. I wrote this off as just the normal headaches associated with owning a century home. Once I achieved my PHD in Duct tape and coat hanger technology, the demons shifted strategies and started working on the wife. Every night that place siphoned off a little bit of her better attributes until there was nothing left but the lesser ones. I won’t expand on the details of her moral and mental decay publicly for the sake of my now adult children, but suffice it to say that her behavior would have made Jerry Springer blush. By the end of the eighties I was a single father with drained bank accounts and a mountain of debt.

I am not exactly proud of the next phase because I almost succumbed to the effects of hell house. My nephew and his wife moved in to help with the kids and other domestic issues while I worked. I became a fixture at one of the local haunts drowning my sorrows on a daily basis after work. I knew I had bottomed out when the owner of the place, a good man of conscience and a true friend, came to my home and told me he loved my business, but cared about me more. His kindness and honesty snapped me back into reality. The house demon retaliated a month later. His wife found him dead of a massive coronary. He was only fifty and in reasonably good shape. My nephew and niece did not escape unscathed either. While there, he knocked up one of her friends and she got knocked up by one of his.

The company I worked at from the beginning sold out to an out of state outfit that moved the plant. I had seen the writing on the wall and had gradually developed another income stream fixing everything from electronic equipment to rental houses in Cleveland. I was sorely tempted at the time to off the place and move closer to Cleveland. The demons must have sensed it and eased up for a bit. I caved into my sons’ and a few other’s wishes and stayed put. Things were starting to look up. I even found a new mate, but the demons were just toying with me. They had to let me heal up a little so I could endure more misery.

It is hard enough to make a relationship work when both have children from previous marriages and plenty of emotional baggage. I even joked with her about the place having some sort of curse on it that made small problems into big ones. She refused to be beaten by it. After a year of pounding out our differences and dealing with the evil stepparent syndrome we finally enjoyed a nice holiday season in 95. The House couldn’t handle it. A couple of weeks later, the original house went up in flames and took her with it.

The fire not only took her life, but the lives of all my pets except her favorite cat. I found her crying, half frozen and covered in soot, hiding under the hood of my van. She only escaped the curse for a short while. She succumbed to an extremely rare feline disease a few months later. The origin of the fire was never determined, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe the demons left the door of the portal to hell open.

Grief, depression and anger clouded my better judgment. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have buried the ashes in the basement put a ruler in the front yard and contracted somebody to mow the weeds down when they were taller than the ruler was, but Nooooo. Dummy here had to adopt his late soulmate’s mantra and not allow that place to beat him. I had to go back for more by trying to rebuild.

After paying off the 11.5% Mortgage with the insurance money, I had enough to basically build a small el-cheapo shack if I did a lot of the work on my own. Banks don’t lend money to self-employed people and they don’t lend money on partially completed homes unless you already have the money or assets. My Mom, a successful realtor and landlord, offered to help, but she wanted me to design and build a large high-end “model home”. The idea being that she could sell them and contract the work to me. I agreed, thinking maybe something good would come after all that bad. She said it was foolish to pay interest on money before we needed it. She said to just start building and when I was about out of money, she would borrow against her rental properties to keep the project alive.

There wasn’t much left of my old home. I took down what was left of it with a chainsaw, a rope and an old Ford one ton. The worst part of the job was uncovering the barely identifiable, scorched remnants of my former life. I probably could have spared myself the emotional trauma by just by bulldozing it, but the dissection and foraging was something I felt I needed to do to heal myself.

The curse kicked back in as soon as I began to rebuild. The basement had to be redug because the original one was too close to the street to comply with zoning laws. During the dig, we discovered an old cistern. I watched as thousands of dollars in gravel, concrete and I-beam vanished into what may have very well been that portal to hell I previously mentioned. I managed to get the footers in and the block set up in the center of the basement. The night before the blockies were scheduled to begin, we got a freak storm that dumped a torrential, record, three inches of rain in just a couple hours that caved in the walls of the hole and created a mud soup with cinderblock dumplings in the middle. I managed to get the rough framing done before I was broke as a joke.

Mom kept her end of our arrangement. She applied for and was approved for a large line of credit. She decided to take a vacation while the bank did the paperwork. The final approval and paperwork made it to her desk, but she never did. Mom came back from her vacation in a Hearse.

In the movies when somebody endures disaster after disaster the neighbors all get warm and fuzzy and pitch in. Mine just bitched about the mess. One of who happened to be a councilman who was only concerned about his own property value being brought down. He actually drafted and got passed a local ordinance he could use to drag me into court with. I could at this point go into the expensive and gory details of the multiple court hearings, but in the interest of brevity and keeping you reading, I will sum it up as I was given the choice of putting an exterior on the house or going to jail. To avoid jail, I financially gutted what was left of my construction business effectively killing it. I spent money on hellhouse I knew I shouldn’t, but at the time, I figured owing IRS a few grand was better than jail. Now I wonder.

I gave up and put the house on the market with the intent of paying off IRS with the proceeds of the sale. The house sat on the market for 3 years before I got a viable offer on it. I thought I would finally be done bleeding and be able to start over again until the Realtor ran a title check and discovered IRS had levied leans totaling more than I had earned in the previous five years. Obviously an IRS error.

Even if you make no money in a year, IRS can invent an income for you and tax you on it. IRS is a faceless, untouchable bully that operates above the law. Once you are in their gunsights, you have no right to due process, right to face your accuser or even to get a hold of somebody there to plead your case to. They hide behind phone trees and answering machines. Even if you spend the months required to navigate the sea of bureaucratic BS and get them to admit they erred, they won’t amend the liens on your property until the corrected amount is paid in full.

The delay killed the sale. The errant IRS liens and the lengthy song and dance routine required to circumvent them at the time of sale pretty much assures there won’t be one. The housing market tanked right afterwards leaving me stuck with an unfinished house I can’t live in or sell. The county taxes are piling up. I even had to borrow from loan sharks to stop foreclosures and now they want their due.

If you are one of the few that believe in curses and cursed objects that has a score to settle. Here is your opportunity to drop some serious stink-whammy on somebody. A shovel full of this demonic adrenaline in their garden or shrub beds should do the job. For the rest of you that just write this off as another desperate E-bay attempt to raise money, you are welcome for the read. I am desperate. If you have the wherewithal to help me end this nightmare, bid away.